Gideon of the Trials

In Commander, Gideon of the Trials is a niche but potent piece in dedicated Gideon-tribal or life-manipulation shells — the emblem is significantly harder to set up in a four-player game, but once active it creates a political and mechanical lock that demands an answer. In Modern and Pioneer, he's seen play as a sideboard disruptor against combo decks, where shutting off a specific permanent's trigger for a turn buys enough time to close the game. Legacy gives him stiff competition from other three-mana planeswalkers, so he appears mainly in decks that specifically want the emblem or need the indestructible-creature mode as a backup threat. Across all constructed formats, his ceiling is determined entirely by whether your deck can reliably maintain a Gideon on board — without that, the emblem evaporates.